An animal bone fragment covered with human-made pits provides a possible example of how early humans in Western Europe may have fashioned clothes.

According to research published in Science Advances on April 12, the almost 40,000-year-old relic most likely served as a punch board for leatherwork. They think that the bone piece was positioned beneath the animal skin as the fabric was being pierced, possibly for seams. If true, it predates eyed needles in the area by almost 15,000 years and is the oldest tool of its sort known to exist.

The about 11-centimeter-long bone fragment, which was discovered at an ancient site south of Barcelona, has 28 punctures dispersed on one flat surface, with 10 of them aligned and rather equally spaced.

Given that some holes are difficult to discern and the bone piece wasn't differently shaped, the marks don't appear to have been a notation system or adornment, according to archaeologist Luc Doyon of the University of Bordeaux in France. He believed the marks might have been created by leatherwork. But the theory wasn't confirmed, directing Doyon's subsequent actions, until he went to a cobbler's shop and observed one of the craftsman's tools.

He and his colleagues used weapons like pointed flint, horns, and antlers to pierce cattle rib bones in an effort to replicate the holes in the artifact. Pits resembling those on the bone fragment were made by piercing leather over bone with a burin, a pointed stone chisel, by hammering it with a hammer-like implement.

Additional research indicated that the artifact's 10 neat punctures were created with the same instrument, and they were all aligned and spaced equally. This suggests that holes were made in the leather and a threading instrument was used to sew a seam.

Long before the earliest known eyed needles, scientists were aware that humans wore garments (SN: 4/20/10). "What [the new discovery] tells us is that the technology for making fitted clothing was in the toolkit of the first modern humans who lived in Europe," adds Doyon.